戴花帽的自画像

Ensor spent almost his whole life in the seaside town of Ostend, above his family's souvenir shop, and he built this self-portrait as a quiet act of ambition. He borrowed the pose and the feathered hat straight from Rubens, the Flemish master every Belgian painter measured himself against. The first version, from the mid-1880s, was a sober academic likeness. A few years later he went back and loaded the hat with flowers and gaudy plumes, turning a serious portrait into something faintly absurd and theatrical, which was the direction his whole art was taking. Before long he would be painting carnival masks and skeletons. The picture stayed in his home region and now hangs at Mu.ZEE in Ostend.